


It spills from your skin

by towardsmorning



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, F/F, Fluff, Grimdark, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2012-10-02
Packaged: 2017-11-15 11:27:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/526795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/towardsmorning/pseuds/towardsmorning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(<i>Prompt: happy body horror Rose/Kanaya.</i>)</p><p>Just because the two of them are monsters does not mean that they don't have any class about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It spills from your skin

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was for happy body horror Rose/Kanaya and the result is... weird. I don't know where this came from, and it should probably be less disjointed, but WHATEVER, MONSTROUS LADIES. That's all the excuse I need. It's a commentboxed 4am fic about grimdark Rose and vampiric Kanaya being domestic; I like to think we all know what we're getting into here.

They exist, it seems to Rose, in a constant state of contrasts. Kanaya could turn off her luminescence if she wished to; evidently, she does not. It pulses and fades with her moods, sometimes a sickly light that washes out any room she enters, sometimes a heavy, harsh light that leaves spots behind your eyelids when they close. She is tall, she is thin, she makes Rose think of angels in the way angels are supposed to be, the kind of divine that strikes fear in a person. Her teeth are wicked and her nails filed to perfection, pointed and glazed the deep green that can, in the right context, mean blood. As though Kanaya would ever dirty her own with the real thing, of course. It's murder to get out from underneath the tips.

They both of them are a pair; Rose's skin grows more and more like ash by the day, starting off as a delicate grey and spiralling down into something thick and choking from there. Even its texture seems unkempt nowadays, she thinks sometimes, brushing fingertips over her arms and marvelling at it. When they lie next to each other and entwine their fingers the difference is unavoidable. She'd laugh happily at the sight if she still had the kind of voice-box that allowed for laughter. They cut the kind of picture together that a younger Rose Lalonde would be just dying to write into prose, or perhaps even a rare poem.

Age doesn't make much of a difference to them nowadays, though.

*

Rose doesn't have blood now. Thick black treacle inches out of her flesh when cut, and sometimes when not. This is a little distressing. Kanaya still has to eat, after all.

"It just isn't the same," she says to Rose, looking agitated. "It sticks in my teeth very badly."

Rose nods and arranges her expression into one of sympathy. The darkness around her curls, instinctive, towards Kanaya, a type of particularly menacing hug, but it ends up warring it out with the irritated flickering of harsh light Kanaya emits when displeased.

"I suppose that means we're back to larcenous dealings with the local hospital, then," Kanaya says, sighing the sigh of a woman who has caught her dress on broken windows one too many times to be enthusiastic.

*

Her body doesn't need sleep these days. She tries anyway, lies next to Kanaya and prods her brain into slowly shutting off. The voices never really leave her but they come clearly and without distortion when she manages, overlapping inside her head until she swears it must begin to leak out her ears and into the world where 'living' is a concept that means enough to actually be worth conceptualizing in the first place.

"You thrash in your sleep, you know," Kanaya tells her over breakfast- that is, mumbles around a plastic bag, fangs sunk in and making a terrible mess. "Can't you talk to them more peacefully?"

She has, Rose thinks, no sense of drama sometimes.

*

Their house is a normal thing, rooms with windows, doors, a bed and a table and all the domestic trappings that make a home somewhere to call sweet. Just because the two of them are monsters does not mean that they don't have any _class_ about it. The challenge of maintaining interior decor when one is prone to dribbling blood everywhere and the other sometimes absent-mindedly leaks something close to tar from her pores keeps Kanaya busy, at any rate.

*

Time is a deceptive beast. It plays tricks on the mind, especially upon minds like theirs. Some days, Rose sits and patiently walks her way back through the maze that is her head, retracing her steps to see how many they have taken since her last check. Outside their circle of two the world moves on, rises and falls and rises again as they sit and hold hands and plot petty theft because blood is still not an accepted commodity at the local store. There is a measure of peace to be found in the simplicity that comes from no longer having a frame of reference for how time passes, Rose thinks. Even if it makes it hard to remember things. Sometimes Kanaya will fold her arms around Rose's middle, nails scratching just lightly at her sides while she talks herself hoarse to remind them both of whatever feels relevant at the time.

Every now and again, they remind each other of things like birthdays; that they were, in fact, born.

"I was hatched," Kanaya reminds Rose, who simply rolls her eyes.

"Ssul f'taung lagansuth," says Rose, trying for chiding. She succeeds, if Kanaya's own eyeroll is anything to go by, and after all this time, Rose thinks that's what it all comes down to. Body language and expressive eye rolls and enough memories to wear Kanaya's voice down to something as gutteral as her own, in a house they built to house their respective monsters. The contrasts between them when they touch.

The little things in life are what make it living.

**Author's Note:**

> Title adapted from Hardest of Hearts by Florence + the Machine.


End file.
